India 2.0

A very good friend of mine often uses the expression:


Do what you love and don't lie.

I love emi. I love the work I am doing here. I love England. I love British culture. I would be lying, however, if I said I loved blogging.


I love that blogging about my experiences here includes you in my life and in the ministry you are helping to support, but writing long accounts of my trips takes it out of me.  This is not meant to be an excuse, merely a confession and perhaps a bit of insight as to why my blog entries have become sparse as of late.  Even so, I do wish to keep you all in the loop so I do apologize for just now getting around to recording my time in India.


I returned from my past project trip to Vellore, India a week or so into October.  It turned out to be a unique but exciting trip! My pictures from the trip have been up on my picasa site for a while so take a look at those if you havent already.  The captions usually give a good summary as you scroll through them.


The India trip started out crazy, which seems now to be the norm for these projects!  The project our team had been expecting to go do was with a ministry called the HOPE House.  They run a girl's orphanage in Vellore, India.  A couple of weeks before the trip, the ministry notified us that the land they expected to own had not been purchased yet and thus, they did not want a team to come design anything yet.  It was at this point I was leaving for Mussoorie, India with one of our interns to go work at the eMi office in India for a week before the project trip took place.


Deb and I took off for Delhi not knowing what exactly our team was meant to be doing when we all arrived.  Once arriving up the mountain to the office in Mussoorie, we set to work despite our rainy arrival to commandeering the eMi India storehouse of CAD standards and project knowledge.  Due to monsoon rains, there was much time spent indoors with chai, books (namely Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and the Bible), and a blanket.  The amazing thing about monsoon rain is its predictability.  After the afternoon rainstorm, we would go out for a walk around the hilly village.  The majority of the office staff and interns were out on project trips so it was a quiet week with only one two other staff members and two little ones roaming around the office.


In that one week, we found three other potential projects and lost three potential projects in Vellore.  After a while I stopped paying attention to whether we had a project to go do or not.  Seeing as we all had plane tickets already and a place to stay, the rest of the uk team decided to come out anyway and meet up with a team from the India office.  The plan from the beginning was to join with them in Vellore for devotions and meals but work on separate projects.  The hope was that there would be enough work for two or three extras on their project for some of our team members while Mike and I networked and drank chai :)  or at least that was my hope.

Remember that crazy rain in Pakistan? There was a slight bought of it in northern India as well.  A couple days before Deb and I as well as Matt and Ivy (directors from the India office) were meant to catch a two day train from Dehradun to Chennai, rain poured all day long without ceasing.  The morning of the train, we find that rain had flooded the tracks and collapsed a temple wall in the path of our train.  This particular train runs once a week of course.  leaving us a choice between showing up a week late for our two week project trip or try to get to delhi and hop a last minute flight to chennai.  Matt knew of two missionary friends of his traveling to Delhi that very day and thus we hitched a ride.  What should be about a five-eight hour drive took us 14 hours.


The same destructive rains took out a bunch of bridges, making the main roads impenitrable.  Forced to take the unpaved, poorly marked back-roads, we found ourselves weaving between and sometimes through precarious puddles the width of the road...

After getting to Delhi somehow our GPS switched its destination back to Dehradun so we then proceeded to drive in a huge two hour long circle around Delhi.  Needless to say, it was a particularly joyous occasion when we finally arrived at the house we were staying that night before our flight the next morning.




That brings us to south India, to the state of Tamil Nadu.  Home of fantastic cuisines such as idlis, dosas, coconut curries, rassam, vada and amazing chai and coffee!

I am looking past the agonizing heat and my swollen feet from so many mosquito bites and focusing on the goodness.


As for the project
God worked everything out magnificently.  Our team ended up having five different small projects to work on and Mike and I still got our networking and chai breaks in.  There were a couple of guest houses for a ministry called MUT.  This ministry supports missionaries by providing guest houses for much needed vacations, sabbaticals, and retreats while they are serving around the country.  There was a hostel and retirement home for the KIM ministry who wanted to provide these services to a village community outside of Vellore.  

We visited and designed toilet blocks, landscaping, and a chapel for a slum site and a gypsy site.  And I worked on a planning feasibility study as well as a preliminary building design for the new HOPE House orphanage.  


A couple of the girls at the gypsy site really stole my heart while we were visiting there.  Right after stepping out of the van a group of kids gathered around us and all of them wanted to shake our hands to say hello! None of them knew English but two girls in particular followed my every move and kept trying to repeat my name.  As I parted the rest of the team to roam around the site and document the site via photography, the two girls figured out what I was doing and ended up leading me around and pointing to things that I should take pictures of: a rabbit cage, a boy asleep in a hammock, pathways, houses, and the like.  They would travel in front of me, one pulling me along by the hand the other shooing people in front of us away to make room for the picture scene.  Meanwhile the ginnie and adam were testing the drinking water for bacteria which had drawn a huge crowd of on-lookers.  This is not unusual; however, this crowd proceeded to bring them chairs to sit in, brought large fronds to fan them with, and even found an electric fan for them! After they had finished the water tests, they all clapped for our engineers! 


The love and hospitality of these people who have so little in the way of possessions absolutely exemplified what the joy and love of Christ means when put into action.  A people we could hardly communicate with, had never met before, and spent only about a couple hours with, reached me with a more tangible picture of Christ's love than I had ever experienced.  How appropriate that they would be viewed by the rest of the world as outcasts, down-and-outs, the poor people.  Perhaps richness should be measured in joy.


Before we left the site, we sang a song for the group and one of the children asked Jean, our host and translator, why my skin was so white.  Jean's reply, "Ask God."  The two girls then took off the necklaces they were currently wearing and put them over my head as a parting gift.  Never before had I wished more that I had been wearing jewellery that day so that I could exchange with them.  Maybe next time we meet, God will point them out to me so I can give them one of my necklaces.




HOPE House (Helping Orphans Prevail in Everything)

Also a tremendous ministry.  HOPE House, India, run by Ruby Nakka, provides girls whose parents are deceased or otherwise unable to care for them with housing, food, medical needs, health programs, activities, bible teaching, and education.  The belief of HHI is that their role is to provide the parents or guardians with support to be able to care for the girls within their own home as the first option and as a last option admitting them into the HOPE House.  When the family is at all capable of caring for the girls, they act as a support and encouragement to the family in order to keep the children at home.  When this is not an option, a girl will be admitted to the HOPE House family.  Once staying at the HOPE House, the girls are still strongly encouraged to keep up relationships with whatever family members they have so as to continue family ties.  The girls are taught responsibility, values, reading and writing, good hygiene and health habits, about the love of Jesus, and other important life skills.  The ministry is a fantastic example of a holistic ministry, teaching and providing love and care in all aspects of life for these girls.  HOPE House International plans to expand its reach to care for children with physical and mental challenges as well as children which are HIV affected.  The medical needs for the HOPE House children are graciously provided by the famous mission hospital Christian Medical College & Hospital, in Vellore.


Ruby grew up as an orphan himself in a an institutionalized orphanage and thus, has fashioned his girls home in the opposite manner.   He emphasizes that the house belongs to the girls and they thus feel responsibility and pride for it and upkeep it.  Because there are only 16 of them in the house, it has much more of a family feel to it. 

http://www.hhinternational.org/

The home that the girls live in currently is a rented property which they have to vacate in the next year.  As I said before they backed out of a full emi project because the land they thought they would own at the time of our visit was still being debated by their board of directors back in the USA.  However, the part that was being debated was the amount of land to be purchased.  The location of the potential site had been decided.  This allowed us to do a planning study showing how much would fit on different site size options and a preliminary building design for a new girls home.  Since coming back to the UK and doing master planning drawings such as this one, the ministry has decided to purchase a one acre site.  I am now working on a more solid set of building design drawings.  The goal is to get this mini report completed and sent back to India by the time I go home for the Christmas holidays so that they can use the design and layouts for pre-construction. 


Ironic then that I have time to do my blog now of all times.  This would be the reason we did not make it into the office today...


Again I apologize for taking so long to update you all.  Despite my lack of eagerness to blog, I thank you so very much for your continued support and making spontaneous projects in India happen!


From a lovely warm cup of tea in my hand, log fire in front of me, and cream scones on my lap, happy december :)


...next trip: hospital deisgn. Rwanda. March. be there.